I’ve always considered real-time chat between a service organization and the people that they serve to be a major selling factor. To have a real live person able to answer my questions as I have them while I shop online is great. It brings in some of the friendliness of old brick-and-mortar stores.

Live chat is great, however, it has been plagued on the web with several problems including difficulty of setup (typically involving a chat server setup and hacky client interfaces). A great deal of work has been done in several small open source projects, unfortunately, they have frequently faltered due to the small developer support.

Enter Drupal module: Chat Room . Chat Room is a moduled designed to do exactly what it says: implement a chat room. However, it does that with an additional caveat of doing this without any additional server configuration. No IRC server. No XMPP server. No federation with various Jabber/XMPP servers. Just your Drupal installation. This worked, however, it wasn’t *great*. At DrupalCon London, they moved to the next step and began utilizing Node.js to do the serverside client tracking and client-to-client chat capabilities similar to what you see with Facebook chat (albeit with a different architecture since Facebook chat utilizes XMPP).

This is but one example what can be done with Node.js which I just a few minutes blogged about here in Node.js = ultralight httpd right-hand. As I mentioned there, this is new to me as it is to many. However, I’m eagerly anticipating Node.js as a great way to handle a number of realtime issues that as web developers we have come to accept as limitations of the platform. When I’ve tested a bit more extensively, I’ll post more!